Silicon Laboratories Mixed Signal Microcontroller Support

The Crossware enhancements allow developers to rapidly exploit the advanced features of these C8051 chips by providing a combination of wizards, simulation, debugging, compiler extensions and pre-configuration. This allows the programmer to accelerate the development process and significantly reduce new product time-to-market.

Crossware's Code Creation Wizards are provided for all on-chip peripherals, and many are able to generate configuration code, interrupt routines and, for the UARTs, complete I/O handlers. The simulator simulates the 8051 core itself as well as many of the on-chip peripherals. This allows a developer to use the simulator to immediately test the code created using the wizards. The simulator can also be extended using the Virtual Workshop Interface, allowing developers to construct a simulation of their complete target system.

Silicon Labs' 8-bit mixed-signal MCUs feature a high-speed pipelined 8051 CPU, ISP Flash memory and on-chip debug in each device. The chips also have a configurable high-performance analog core of up to 100 MIPS, and in-system programmability to provide the user with complete design flexibility, superior system performance and greater end product differentiation.

Crossware's source-level debugger drives the Silicon Laboratories' JTAG emulation cartridge directly. This allows it to make use of the full range of on-chip debug facilities including the hardware data breakpoints and hardware stack overflow and underflow trap.